LeBron James Goes Home

LeBron James, a player so great that he somehow both invites and resists all parables, especially those about prodigal sons, is coming home to Cleveland after two weeks of speculation, Internet sleuthing, and rampant workplace distraction. (Between the World Cup and LeBron, how many hours of productivity were lost to sports?) LeBron’s big decision—his second—started with reports from anonymous sources, quickly moved to jokes about anonymous sources, then to discussions about the legitimacy of anonymous sources. Just past noon on Friday, the tension finally broke, when Sports Illustrated published an essay by LeBron, as told to the peerless Lee Jenkins. “Before anyone cared where I would play basketball, I was a kid from Northeast Ohio,” the essay begins. “People there have seen me grow up,” he continues. “I sometimes feel like I’m their son.… My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now.”

The sportswriting scolds of America have had their Red Weddings over the past ten years at the hands of the quants, the über-scolds, and the sort of writer who feeds sports (and everything else) through the postmodern machinery of his or her liberal-arts education. (As someone near the last of these camps, I would like to say that I miss the old scolds. Vive le Mushnick!) And so, while I’m sure there will be some column space filled about how Cleveland fans should not “accept” LeBron back and some catastrophic metaphors/cosplay-narratives about jilted girlfriends and dignity, the overwhelming mood among basketball fans waiting for LeBron’s announcement felt both anxious and celebratory. Fans of the underdog couldn’t help but root for Cleveland, a city that hasn’t won a championship since 1964. Lovers of family, small towns, and happy endings must have teared up a bit at the thought of the embattled hero, still stinging from a humiliating defeat at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs, limping back home.

Much of this good will comes from the N.B.A.’s ongoing labor debacle. In January, Forbes released a report that placed the average value of an N.B.A. franchise at six hundred and thirty-four million dollars, a twenty-five-per-cent increase from 2013. That number would quickly be made irrelevant in May when the Milwaukee Bucks, which Forbes had valued dead last, at four hundred and five million dollars, sold for five hundred and fifty million. Then, last month, after the N.B.A. commissioner Adam Silver forced the sale of the Los Angeles Clippers from the disgraced owner Donald Sterling, Steve Ballmer, of the Microsoft fortune, purchased the team for two billion dollars (Forbes had the value of the Clippers franchise listed at five hundred and seventy-five million dollars). The rush of N.B.A. money has made the deal the players got at the end of the 2012 lockout—which, with its restrictive salaries, seemed bad enough at the time—look downright appalling.

Over the past year, there have been signs of change. Perhaps for the first time in the history of American professional sports, the public sentiment seems to have swung to the side of the players. It’s too early to assess the full fallout of Sterling’s ugly saga, but I can’t imagine there were many N.B.A. fans who watched the Clippers players and their coach Doc Rivers come out to play Game Four of their playoff series against the Golden State Warriors—their first after the Sterling news broke—and not feel the full force of the N.B.A.’s power structure. Black players make up roughly seventy-five per cent of the league. Michael Jordan is the only black principal owner. The tired mantra that every labor fight in professional sports is a battle between “millionaires and billionaires,” and therefore should be cast aside as frivolous, fell apart when it came up against that absurd scene: a black team with a black coach playing in front of tens of thousands of fans whose ticket money would eventually find its way into the pockets of Donald Sterling. There was no way any reasonable person could watch Doc Rivers trying to coach his dejected team and conclude that the problem with the N.B.A. was that the players had too much power.

“There is no room for Donald Sterling in our league,” LeBron told a reporter in the early days of the scandal. Later, he said that he would lead a player boycott if Sterling still owned the Clippers at the start of the 2015 season. In his move toward political engagement, in his transparency, and in his willingness to speak his mind, LeBron has gone far beyond the safe, say-nothing, commercial-friendly template offered up by Jordan, Derek Jeter, and the mid-career Tiger Woods. He is becoming something that we hardly see at all in sports—a sponsor-friendly superstar who has figured out how to safely yet provocatively pick his fights.

How refreshing, then, that LeBron would resist the outdated demand from fans and sports media that a player who has no expectation of loyalty should still be endlessly loyal to his franchise. Sports is a business only when it needs to be ruthless. When it needs to control a player, a sports team presents itself as a family or an edict with which you can raise your children. LeBron witnessed this dynamic first hand, in 2010, when he made a business decision and left the Cleveland Cavaliers, who had surrounded him with an unworthy supporting class, to go win championships with the Miami Heat. It’s telling that in the Sports Illustrated essay, LeBron was the one talking, sincerely, about the kids of Northeast Ohio. “I feel my calling here goes above basketball. I have a responsibility to lead, in more ways than one, and I take that very seriously. My presence can make a difference in Miami, but I think it can mean more where I’m from. I want kids in Northeast Ohio, like the hundreds of Akron third-graders I sponsor through my foundation, to realize that there’s no better place to grow up.”

Compare the vitriol that LeBron endured for what was admittedly a doomed PR campaign surrounding “The Decision,” his broadcast announcing the move to Miami—the attacks on his character and the overwhelming sense that he had betrayed an entire city—with the shrugs and the “business is business” statements that meet any loyal, hard-working player who gets cut by his team. Due to the disastrous collective-bargaining agreement reached at the end of the last lockout, LeBron will make somewhere in the range of twenty million dollars, when all reasonable estimates have his annual worth to a franchise at somewhere between forty and seventy-five million dollars. Again, does that look like a system in which the players have too much power?

By leaving Miami to go back home to Cleveland, LeBron, who is worth far more to the N.B.A. than any owner, has taken back a fraction of the power he and other players have earned and continued the trend that he, Chris Bosh, and Dwyane Wade started whereby players, still working within a restrictive and draconian labor system, can scratch out a small measure of autonomy. In professional sports, the players are the business. The league is stronger when it remembers that.

Photograph: Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE via Getty.

Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day.